In December 2013, midway between his leading a military coup and having the presidency of Egypt rubber-stamped with 96% of the vote, an audio recording was leaked of the then-general Abdel Fattah el-Sisi describing a series of strange dreams.

In one, he brandished a sword engraved in red with the central tenet of Islam: “there is no god but God”. In another, he wore a large Omega watch set with a green star. In a third, he met the former president Anwar Sadat, assassinated by a jihadi cell in his own army in 1981, who told him: “I always knew I would be president of the republic.” “I also know I will be president of the republic,” replied dream-Sisi.

Until the coup of summer 2013, no one unblessed with this clairvoyance could have guessed that devout, softly spoken Sisi – who most Egyptians had never heard of until his hapless predecessor Mohamed Morsi named him defence minister a year earlier – would ever lead his country. But for him, the visions hinted, the trinity of God, money and the state confirmed that it had always been his destiny.

Those who hated Sisi – Morsi’s Islamist supporters, urban liberals – mocked their details: the tacky bling of the designer watch, the soap-opera dialogue with Sadat. “Are we in North Korea?” they asked on Facebook. “It’s not enough that we have a dictator, but he has to be crazy, too?” But the dreams were less evidence of delusional tendencies than an attempt to coax the chaos of the preceding three years into a tidy narrative leading inexorably to his inauguration.

With Sisi’s rise, Egypt has come to a point of relative stability (one of the president’s favourite words), where it indeed seems plausible to say that things were always going to be this way. This is where Wendell Steavenson’s Circling the Square ends, with the coup and a hint at its bloody aftermath, when the security forces killed 1,000 supporters of the ousted Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood on Cairo’s streets. It documents the 29 turbulent months that preceded that moment, starting with Steavenson’s arrival in Cairo on 29 January 2011, four days after young Egyptians had taken to the streets in the protests that would bring down the superannuated president Hosni Mubarak.

As soon as her feet hit Tahrir Square, Steavenson is hooked. A tough and experienced foreign correspondent – a veteran of Afghanistan, Iran, Georgia (the subject of her spirited first book, Stories I Stole) and Iraq (that of her sobering second, The Weight of a Mustard Seed) – she is disarmed by the immediate emotional connection she feels with revolutionary Tahrir and its inhabitants. She finds herself not only reporting on their struggle for freedom, but feeling that she is living it alongside them.

In hindsight, the arc of Egypt’s revolution – Mubarak’s fall, the interim rule by military council, the further lethal protests, the rise of Islamist parties, the parliamentary and presidential votes, the election of the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Morsi and his eventual removal by the army – appears familiar and obvious. At the time, it was anything but. “Every day we had no idea what would happen,” Steavenson observes of those adrenaline-crazed times in Cairo, punctuated by the rumble of tanks and the acrid burn of tear gas. Even that journalistic touchstone, the eyewitness account, begins to unravel. “I began to realise that witnessing something did not give you any good sense of what had really happened,” she writes. “A person bearing witness was the most unreliable narrator of all.”

But she recognised that this complexity wouldn’t suit her editors (Steavenson was sent to Cairo by the New Yorker). She is frank about the pressure on her as a journalist to “explain” Egypt, to distil the revolution’s swirling currents into an authoritative account of “characters and beginnings and middles and conclusions”. She describes listening to herself spin a fluent political analysis for a delegation of Scandinavian MPs, only half-believing her own words as they nod earnestly along.

Circling the Square eschews this manufactured certainty for a kaleidoscope of impressions that reflect the sensory onslaught of Cairo in general and revolutionary Cairo in particular. This is the revolution up close and personal, a vivid taste of the fear and exhilaration of protest in the square, embellished with excursions – to a subsidised bakery, to play pool with local strongmen, on a beach holiday with a military intelligence officer – that illuminate the subtler workings of Egyptian society.

Just as the book’s focus is Tahrir, an unrepresentative fragment of a wider Egypt, it is peopled disproportionately by cosmopolitan, English-speaking stars of the liberal protest movement. Befriending them, Steavenson gets an insight into their simultaneous integrity and insularity, which eventually sealed the fate of liberal parties at the ballot box. One of the book’s wryest passages is an account of the revolutionary hero and Google executive Wael Ghonim having his portrait taken by the celebrity photographer Platon, Ghonim paralysed by endlessly recursive scruples about which expression to adopt, how the photo would be perceived and whether or not he should tweet about it.

However evocative these glimpses, the problem – as Steavenson acknowledges – lies in piecing them together into a coherent picture. Throughout the book, she watches classic films about uprisings, wars and revolutions – Z, Circle of Deceit, The Skin, 1900, Napoléon – to see how others have told these stories before her. But, watching the coup unfold on her final night in Egypt, she comes back to the thought that “everything passes through your brain like a hurtling train”. It’s a challenging position for a writer, and a threatening one for anyone living through a revolution – even, his carefully curated dreams suggest, for a string-puller such as Sisi. It’s not hard to see why Egyptians, given the choice, embraced first the righteous certainty of the Muslim Brotherhood, then the familiar brutality of the army.

•Generation Revolution by Rachel Aspden will be published by Harvill Secker next year. To orderCircling the Square for £11.99 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.